At a symposium honouring Venturi Scott Brown & Associate’s
contribution to architecture, Robert Venturi delivered his lecture
in the form of a slide show, of things ‘we love’.1 After a short introduction, the bulk of the
presentation was simply things (or, more precisely, images and
names of things) loved by him and his partner Denise Scott Brown,
which the audience laughed at and with appreciatively, both in
solidarity with what was being celebrated (sauerkraut! Las Vegas!)
and for the switch into a non-analytic mode of expression in the
midst of exalted proceedings.2 This
emphasis on things (or on images of things) and the straightforward
listing of them is not a new idea, but for Venturi and Scott Brown,
two of the founders of Postmodernism in architecture, to do this
carried different valences — positive ones — versus earlier
attempts in the genre, such as Georges Perec’s satire of
consumerism, The Things: A Story of the 1960s. The novel,
published in France in 1965, ends with its protagonists, an
upwardly mobile Parisian couple, fleeing to Tunisia to escape all
their possessions, and still being unhappy.

Perec’s novel starts almost cinematically, as a roving eye casts
its glance on the items in the couple’s home: The eye, at
first, would pass along the grey fitted carpet of a long corridor,
narrow and high-ceilinged. The walls would be cupboards of bright
wood, on which brass fittings would gleam. Three engravings, the
first representing Thunderbird, the winner at the Epsom Derby, the
other the paddle-steamer the Ville-de-Monterau, the third, a
Stephenson locomotive…3

This ability of objects to communicate

Footnotes

Robert Venturi, ‘A Disorderly Ode to an Architecture for Now’,
at ‘In Your Face’, organised by Metropolis at the CUNY
Graduate Center, New York, 29 September 2001. An expanded version
of the talk and images is available at http://www.metropolismag.com/html/vsba/robert_venturi.html
(last accessed on
14 July 2011). ↑

Rem Koolhaas, in his response to Venturi’s presentation, asked
if architecture, having now allowed these ‘things’ to be valid
constituents of architecture’s scope (i.e. via Postmodernism),
could now put them ‘back’ (i.e. into the popular culture from which
they came). At which point an audience member accused him of
anti-Americanism.

See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on
the Family Melodrama’ (1972),
in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is,
London: British Film Institute, 1987,
and Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry
James, Melodrama, and the Modeof Excess, New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1995. The term ‘melodrama’ and its reception (of the term as much
as the genre) is highly fraught within film studies, with both
feminist critiques of Elsaesser’s essay (notably by Laura Mulvey
and Barbara Creed) and a critique of the characterisation of the
category and its uniqueness (notably by Steven Neale). Many of the
essays contributing to this debate are reproduced in
Gledhill’s Home Is Where the Heart Is, op. cit.
See also John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama:
Genre, Style, Sensibility, London: Wallflower Press, 2004,
p.20ff. ↑

Wardill’s latest film, Fulll Firearms, concerns a woman
who has amassed a large fortune from the arms trade. To
assuage her guilt for the victims she thereby helped kill, she
builds an enormous house for their orphans. However, even before it
is completed, the house is taken over by squatters, whom she
believes to be the ghosts of the people she has killed, come back
to haunt her. She ultimately abandons the construction of the
house, leaving it as a partial ruin, while her architect has a
nervous breakdown. ↑

Henry James, preface to The American, second edition.
Available at http://www.henryjames.org.uk/
prefaces/text14.htm (last accessed on 15 August 2011). Brooks
identifies James in The Melodramatic Imagination as one of his
melodramatists, a revisionist reading of the arch-realist
writer.↑

Journal

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